Shadow, Evil, and Individuation: Jung’s View of the Devil
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.7 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2025
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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The devil archetype carries three qualities: it promotes bestial violence of every kind, it tries to convince us that the material world is the only reality, and it fools us into thinking we can spiritually ascend through intellect alone. On a personal level, it gathers our disowned infernal traits—envy, rage, greed, and the wish to dominate —and seduces us into believing those qualities are virtues. Once we face our own devilishness and grant it a symbolic form, we can assume a choiceful stance. Lacking that, we try to evacuate our own evil by projecting it onto others and then punishing them. As Jungians, we understand that our inferior function will first present as an imp. Still, with kind concern and thoughtful opportunities, it can transform into an uncanny ally that rescues us from malignant innocence. In its subtle form, the demonic attitude tempts us into literalism as it attacks our capacity to reflect and hold a symbolic attitude. Join us as we circumambulate The Devil in honor of Halloween.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to this Jungian life. |
| 0:03.6 | Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. |
| 0:19.3 | I'm Lisa Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, |
| 0:24.9 | and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod. So the idea of the devil is ubiquitous. |
| 0:46.5 | This idea of evil personified shows up in ancient cultures, |
| 0:52.9 | in modern religions, across history, but the devil is less a monster |
| 0:58.8 | than a mirror. So it crystallizes humanity's intuition that there is a source of destruction |
| 1:06.3 | that is not wholly outside us. And every culture needs an image that gathers its moral shadow, |
| 1:14.5 | the hunger for domination, the delight in cruelty, |
| 1:17.8 | the seductive charm of power. |
| 1:20.3 | So the devil becomes that image, |
| 1:22.6 | the accuser, the trickster, the rebel, the scapegoat, |
| 1:25.6 | the teacher of limits. So historically, he grows from the Hebrew, the rebel, the scapegoat, the teacher of limits. |
| 1:28.2 | So historically, he grows from the Hebrew, |
| 1:31.5 | Hasatan, the divine persecutor, |
| 1:35.6 | and in Christianity, the cosmic opponent. |
| 1:39.3 | And finally, for us as Jungians, |
| 1:42.4 | a symbol of psychological conflict. In the modern era, we may not believe |
| 1:48.4 | that the devil has horns, and yet the archetype survives in us. So Jung saw the devil as the |
| 1:55.9 | psyche's way of dramatizing evil as an autonomous reality within us because the shadow demands recognition |
| 2:04.4 | and to repress or externalize him |
| 2:06.5 | is to become possessed by what we deny. |
... |
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